Structured Visions

As a great sage (a scriptwriter for Saturday Night Live) once wrote, Thanksgiving with the family can be hard. Everyone has different opinions and beliefs. The aftermath of people expressing their different opinions and beliefs at a family meal is beautifully parodied in the sketch, A Thanksgiving Miracle. In Politeness Theory, personal offence is understood … Continue reading Episode 20: Facing Thanksgiving

As a great sage (a scriptwriter for Saturday Night Live) once wrote, Thanksgiving with the family can be hard. Everyone has different opinions and beliefs. The aftermath of people expressing their different opinions and beliefs at a family meal is beautifully parodied in the sketch, A Thanksgiving Miracle. In Politeness Theory, personal offence is understood … Continue reading Episode 20: Facing Thanksgiving

The notion of the ‘paradigm shift’ originates from Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argued that science does not progress in a linear fashion: if new evidence comes in that upsets an established paradigm, it is described as an anomaly and often explained away as human error or flawed research design. When enough new … Continue reading Episode 19: Paradigms

The notion of the ‘paradigm shift’ originates from Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argued that science does not progress in a linear fashion: if new evidence comes in that upsets an established paradigm, it is described as an anomaly and often explained away as human error or flawed research design. When enough new … Continue reading Episode 19: Paradigms

Social structures are like spider webs – interlinked strands of assumptions about the social world that form conceptual networks to support us as we navigate our daily lives. What would be the effect of exposing social structures as oppressive or unjust? On the one hand, we might feel completely unsupported and ungrounded, like Boris the spider … Continue reading Episode 18: They Lied to Us

Social structures are like spider webs – interlinked strands of assumptions about the social world that form conceptual networks to support us as we navigate our daily lives. What would be the effect of exposing social structures as oppressive or unjust? On the one hand, we might feel completely unsupported and ungrounded, like Boris the spider … Continue reading Episode 18: They Lied to Us

All this talk of social structure and how it could be better: does it match your own experience? Last week I talked about a social structure that is divided along gender, and requires boys and men to behave in one way and girls and women to behave in a different way. But I can hear … Continue reading From Paperclips to Marshmallows: False Promises of Individual Choice

All this talk of social structure and how it could be better: does it match your own experience? Last week I talked about a social structure that is divided along gender, and requires boys and men to behave in one way and girls and women to behave in a different way. But I can hear … Continue reading From Paperclips to Marshmallows: False Promises of Individual Choice

I’ve been talking a lot about recognisability in social structures. Closed social structures divide up the world into particular categories such that it becomes impossible to think outside those categories. What doesn’t ‘fit’ within those categories, or identities, or ways of being, or ways of feeling are rejected, ignored or simply not allowed to exist. … Continue reading Blank Boys and Blank Girls

I’ve been talking a lot about recognisability in social structures. Closed social structures divide up the world into particular categories such that it becomes impossible to think outside those categories. What doesn’t ‘fit’ within those categories, or identities, or ways of being, or ways of feeling are rejected, ignored or simply not allowed to exist. … Continue reading Blank Boys and Blank Girls